Very Computer

Are PERL and Python easy to use  and learn  languages and what do they
do exactly?

Adam Peaslee

Yes - you should be able to be productive quite quickly in either. Further, once
you begin to learn, you'll realise that both have huge scope and depth.

What do they do? Check out ;

http://www.perl.com
http://www.python.org

and the news groups ;

comp.lang.perl.misc
comp.lang.perl.modules
comp.lang.perl.tk
comp.lang.python

HTH.

--

Alastair

Both are interpreted languages (sometimes called scripting languages).  To
be more accurate, both are byte-compiled on the fly, but the upshot of this
is that you can execute both just like you would a shell script.  

Perl first became popular with sys admins as a replacement for sh, awk and
sed. Because of its abilities at transmogrifying text it because very
popular for web programming.

Python inhabits roughly the same space of application, but is a somewhat more
elegantly designed language IMO.  I would recommend it over Perl as a first
language, but Perl has the edge in popularity.

I think all the major distributions come with Python now, and they
definitely come with Perl.

So the best way to get a feel for what they are about is to find their
respective tutorials at www.python.org and www.perl.org.  Then at the prompt
type

$ python

or

$ perl

and try a few examples.

Dave Cook